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Lyft just published its first diversity report and it’s not much better than Uber’s

Only 18 percent of Lyft’s engineering team are women, just 3 percent more than Uber’s.

Lyft’s executive team
Lyft’s executive team
Lyft’s executive team

Lyft has just raised the curtain on its corporate diversity numbers for the first time and — surprise, surprise — it’s not a pretty picture.

While 42 percent of the company’s 1,600 employees are women, only 18 percent of its tech and engineering teams identify as female. That’s just a little bit better than Uber, where only a little more than 15 percent in tech and engineering are women.

Looking at other kinds of employee diversity at the company paints an even bleaker picture.

Some 63 percent of its total employee base are white, and 70 percent of its executive team are white. Only 1 percent of its leadership team are black, and black people make up only 6 percent of its overall pool of employees.

For context, almost half of Uber — which also recently published its first diversity report and had fairly dismal numbers — employees are white and about 64 percent are men. Only 8 percent of Uber’s 12,000 employees are black, on last count.

Compare that to Google, which now has around 62,000 employees. As of 2016, the company’s workforce was 31 percent female and around 90 percent white and Asian. Only 5 percent of its employees are black or Hispanic.

When asked why Lyft hasn’t published a report before, a spokesperson said the company was one of 30 that signed a White House tech inclusion pledge in June 2016 and plans to publish a report every year. (In other words, Lyft didn’t provide a real answer.)

“Releasing our data will hold us accountable, but it’s the actions we take that will make a difference to the people who come to work every day at Lyft,” the company said in a blog post. “Our diversity data exposes gaps in important areas. So we’re doing something about it.”

Have more information or any tips? Johana Bhuiyan is the senior transportation editor at Recode and can be reached at johana@recode.net or on Signal, Confide, WeChat or Telegram at 516-233-8877. You can also find her on Twitter at @JmBooyah.

When it comes to diversity, numbers are certainly not everything, but it’s definitely a start.

You can look through the report here. We’ll update if we hear more from Lyft.

Related


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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